Posts Tagged ‘god’

So I started thinking about prime numbers, and why John Nash’s favorite prime would be 23. I think it’s because it’s the first prime number consisting of two consecutive primes: 2 and 3. I wonder if there’s a name for this kind of prime. The next one is 2,357, which shows you how common they are. Others include 3,137 (31 and 37), 5,711 (5, 7, and 11), 111,317 (11-13-17), 171,923 (17-19-23)… I found this site useful.

I found out the year of my birth, 1987, is a prime.

Then I started thinking about pi, how it goes on forever in a totally random, ever-changing sequence of digits. According to Cliff Pickover in Sex, Drugs, Einstein & Elves,

Recall that the digits of pi (in any base) not only go on forever but seem to behave statistically like a sequence of uniform random numbers. In short, if the digits of pi are normally distributed, somewhere inside pi’s string of digits is a very close representation for all of us. …We can even search for some of the first few consecutive runs using computer searches available on the Web. The string 123 is found at position 1924 counting from the first digit after the decimal point…1234 is found at position 13,807. 12345 is found at position 49,702, and so forth.

This means that you can eventually find your birthday in pi (Mine, 06111987, is found at position 148,775,398). Or your phone number, or your social security. Even a numerical representation of your DNA.

Sir or ma’am, you just got your mind blown.

(P.S. What’s the lowest number divisible by any number between 1 and 10? — 2,520)

There are two hills in this town. The university sits atop one; the other has a water tower painted to resemble the American flag:

From the bathroom I can look out and see it peeking over the roof of the church next door to my house. It’s lit from below, giving it a metallic sheen. A ship hides in the belly of the water tower.

So when I relieve myself in the middle of the night, I can look upon the modern trinity of God, UFOs, and American infrastructure.

It took way too long for me to write that.

I used to be able to write a couple pages at once, skinny-dipping into streams-of-consciousness. I’ve never considered myself a poet. More like an efficient recorder of words that come one right after another, that don’t get hung up on tiny details, that never run out of things to say. I know that stream is still there because I can reach it while dozing, not dreaming but not really awake—sometimes I can view whole pages of words, a document of the subconscious, but of course I never remember what it said.

Maybe that’s the thing. It wasn’t really about anything. The conscious mind arranges the words into meaning.

“Roygbiv” from Boards of Canada’s Music Has the Right to Children has that voice loop, the “ay” sound, and there’s no telling what the sample’s really saying, so any listener can apply their own: “hey,” “late,” “face,” “shape,” “space,” “faith,” “fate,” “lace,” the list goes on.

It’s like that with the dream text. Latent thought. Meaningless, yet.

Having a holiday named after me would be bitchen. What do Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King, Saint Patrick, and Christopher Columbus have in common?